Kaustabh Ghosh, PhD
Engineered microenvironments for in situ pancreatic islet generation
Co-mentors:
Donald Ingber, MD, PhD
Judah Folkman, Professor, Dept. of Pathology, Vascular Biology Program, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School
Robert S. Langer, PhD
Institute Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, MIT
-
PhD
State University of NY at Stony Brook (Biomedical Engineering), 2006;
Advisor: Richard A.F. Clark, MD
-
B. Tech
National Institute of Technology, India (Technology) 2001
Diabetes, which poses major health and financial burden, arises from the loss of insulin production by β cells of the islets of Langerhans. Islet transplantation, however, has had limited success in restoring normal islet function, largely due to post-transplantation challenges such as immune rejection, loss of islet cell viability and lack of optimal vascularization, thus suggesting the need to develop alternate therapies. For this proposal, I will seek to identify micro-environmental (chemical as well as physical) determinants that promote EPC adhesion, proliferation and differentiation into mature functional endothelium, and use these findings as design criteria to fabricate multi-functional biomaterials that will induce endothelium-mediated pancreatic islet normalization and/or survival of transplanted β cells when targeted to diseased islets in the body. |
